Nairobi Street-Aesthetics: Distance and Proximity in the Aesthetics of Everyday Life in the Green City

Abstract

This article looks at the relatively recent tendency to aestheticize life in Nairobi’s working-class and informal neighbourhoods in different forms of art and media. It focuses on two case studies – Steve Bloom’s photobook, Trading Places: The Merchants of Nairobi (2009) and the first issue of the Kenyan literary magazine Kwani? (2003). These are compared to the collectively performed poem ‘Mistaken Identity’ (2019) by a group of poets from the neighbourhood of Kayole, to show that the street aesthetics in the two cases rest on distance, while the meaning-making in the poem rests on proximity. Distance in this context takes several forms, such as the gap between socio-economic classes and actual physical distance, but I register it on the level of epistemology. The poem also articulates a form of epistemological proximity between, first, the forms of meaning-making that can be seen in both the text and the visual and performative components of the video, and, second, the place that is portrayed. Rather than arguing that proximity is preferable to distance as a basis of meaning-making, this article attempts to theorize the emergence of a specific aesthetic. This aesthetic presents itself as an aesthetic because the particular forms of social stratification and concomitant social distance between communities and neighbourhood (which have emerged in Nairobi since 2000) allow an economic, political and cultural elite to re-discover the city, which they experience as simultaneously strange and familiar.

Keywords:

• Nairobi
• African urbanity
• everyday life
• proximity
• distance
• Kwani?
• Felly Karembo
• Sheng
• Kenyan poetry
• aestheticisation

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No one can write about a place such as Nairobi without encountering otherness, and therefore also distance. A person born in one of Nairobi’s low-income neighbourhoods who later in life moves up in the world and migrates to a more affluent neighbourhood, or someone who goes there for work, might know two sides of the city and different ways of being, making a living and interacting with others. But a city as diverse and with such sharp socio-economic contrasts as Nairobi is never truly fathomable – to know a neighbourhood or a locally situated sociality intimately means that one must speak many different languages, have many different professions, follow many different religions, in short, live many different lives.

There is perhaps a moment in a city’s history when it becomes aware of itself as a place that is essentially unmappable. Paradoxically, one way in which this moment presents itself is that there is a sudden increase in cultural representations of the city. In the case of Nairobi, this has happened in the last two decades. Obviously, as novels such as Meja Mwangi’s Going Down River Road (1976) attests, the city figured prominently in literature before the 2000s, but a large number of texts published in recent years indicate a new interest in Nairobi, not just as a setting or a metonymy for the postcolony, but as a topic of cultural discussion, a place to explore, a source of narratives. This can be seen in texts ranging from the short story collection Nairobi Noir (2020) and Mukoma wa Ngugi’s Nairobi Heat (2011), to the growing body of urban studies and anthropological works concerning the city. Add to this projects such as ‘The Sound of Nairobi,’ which seeks to map the soundscapes of the city, and the constant global fascination with the city’s matatu culture, as seen in Mbũgua wa Mũngai’s Nairobi’s Matatu Men: Portrait of a Subculture (2013), Kenda Mutongi’s Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi (2017) and the Wachowskis’ Netflix series Sense8 (2015).¹ The prevalence of coffee table books such as Nairobi: An Exploration of a City by Photographers and Writers (Kwani Trust 2011), Grassroots Upgraded by Slum-TV (2012) and the Triennale Design Museum catalogue, Made in Slums: Mathare/Nairobi (2013), also attests to a fascination with the city. All these projects, shows and books – even those produced in Nairobi for a local audience – rely on forms of distance between subject and object insofar as they ‘transport’ the reader/viewer/listener to a place where they are at a safe distance from the precarity and lack of security in the depicted neighbourhoods.

A place in the city where this relation between subject and object becomes apparent is The Alchemist, located at the northern end of Parklands Road in Nairobi’s Westlands. This place is a self-described ‘creative hub’ frequented by young cosmopolitan Kenyans and tourists out for a night of shopping, mojitos and slam poetry (The Alchemist homepage). From the street, The Alchemist resembles one of the corrugated iron shacks in the sprawling slum neighbourhood of Kibera, some six kilometres to the Southwest, only much larger, cleaner and with security guards who check people’s bags before they are admitted. Inside, this architectural aesthetic is even more ‘typical’ – naked wood, corrugated iron, makeshift furniture made from pallets – only here they are the backdrop to a big bar and stage area surrounded by boutiques and food shops. Two boutiques sell accessories, jewellery and fashion items made from locally-sourced materials. Until recently, one could buy DIY fanzines, African and American comics and vinyl records at the World’s Loudest Library. Having stocked up on music zines and Afrofuturist comics, you can get a latte at an ‘African-European Cafe Bistro’ or a burrito from a Mexican bar run by two sisters, and make your way to the stage to listen to some poetry performed by local talent.²

The ‘street’-aesthetic of The Alchemist is neither new nor uniquely Kenyan, yet it takes on a heightened intensity in a city where places such as The Alchemist are a short boda boda ride away from the neighbourhoods whose improvised and informal architecture this aesthetic references. It is fully conceivable that workers employed to build the interior of The Alchemist or to deliver foodstuffs commute from Kibera – where pallets and corrugated iron are considered affordable rather than decorative building materials – and that these workers’ salaries do not allow them to visit The Alchemist as patrons. It caters for what Rachel Spronk refers to as Nairobi’s ‘yuppies,’ or the young middle-class professionals, as indicated by the type of commodities for sale in the shops, the kinds of food and drinks available and their pricing (‘Exploring the Middle Classes’ 95). Spronk identifies ‘a triad of mutually constitutive factors’ that form the basis of her analysis of this demographic: ‘education resulting in salaried occupations, lifestyle choices and modern self-perception’ (‘Exploring the Middle Classes’ 111). Central to her understanding of both lifestyle choices and self-perception is the type of consumption that The Alchemist offers. Spronk argues that ‘a relatively high disposable income plays a major role in this group’s ability to spend money on clothing and recreation, which includes frequenting the dozens of upmarket bars, clubs, and restaurants that dot the urban nightscape’ (‘Exploring the Middle Classes’ 106). In other words, for Spronk, the economic resources of the yuppies give them agency in the form of consumption, which in turn is an expression of what she calls their taste (‘Exploring the Middle Classes’ 106). Arguably, their socioeconomic distance from everyday life in Nairobi’s streets makes it possible for them to see the faux slum architecture from the perspective of aesthetic ‘taste’ rather than perceiving it as a sobering reminder of hardship.

What I mean by the streets is the spaces of ‘everyday life’ in Nairobi’s low-income neighbourhoods, where informality is a central component of most activities. I borrow the term everyday life from anthropological theory, where the term refers to the ‘routines, habits, and phenomena’ of ‘ordinary or common people’ rather than the modes of living of the political and economic elite (Löfgren 4969), which includes the demographic that Spronk studies. Central to the notion of everyday life is the view that individuals do not mindlessly reproduce patterns of behaviour imposed on them from above or as passive consumers; rather, they are agents capable of resisting prescribed modes of being, consuming and acting. Anthropologists of everyday life have studied ‘the creative means by which people invent or initiate alternatives – alternative economy, alternative livelihood, alternative means of transportation’ in contexts of precarity and economic insecurity, especially in Africa (Adebanwi 5). From this perspective, the concept of the street can be understood as urban spaces where lives intersect through creative and often informal modes of transactions and interaction – in ways that are not directly regulated and monitored by the authorities and that often resist regulation. I will return to the relation between everyday life and the notion of informality later in this article.

As will be demonstrated, the spaces of the everyday life of ‘common people’ are the source of the street-aesthetic that The Alchemist uses to appeal to a certain socio-economic bracket. This street-aesthetic can be understood as an assemblage of signifiers that are adapted from architecture, subcultures and modes of life in the street that are combined into an internally cohesive but flexible code that is used as an aesthetic. This includes signifiers lifted from fashion, music, street art, the semiotics of matatu taxi-buses, shop signs and, importantly, narratives of precarity and poverty, and the concomitant creative hustling as an urban mode of existence and its particular ‘series of operations (ways of doing, of making)’ (Mbembe and Nuttall 9; see also Harris 101–24, Quayson 199–203). Though it is composed of signifiers associated with everyday life, the aesthetic should not be confused with everyday life itself, just as airport souvenirs should not be confused with life in the places they reference.

I argue that this street-aesthetic has made its way into Nairobian literature as well as books about Nairobi published elsewhere. I will discuss manifestations of this street aesthetic in two different contexts. First, I will discuss a book by the UK-based South African photographer Steve Bloom, in which this aesthetic is not only manifested, but presented as an aesthetic. Trading Places: The Merchants of Nairobi (2009) does this partly through creating different forms of distance between itself and the street spaces that it depicts. I will then turn to the Kwani? literary journal, in which distance is paradoxically also central. As I will argue in my analysis of the first Kwani? issue (2003), the journal foregrounded its connection with the Nairobi streets even though it was run by a relatively economically privileged cultural clique and remained too expensive to be within the means of most Kenyans. It is thus primarily as an aesthetic product of editorial choices and literary style that Kwani? foregrounded its ‘street-ness’. In this sense, Kwani? is different from texts whose authors are so embedded in the everyday life of the Nairobi street that everyday life imprints itself on the text linguistically and through literary form. The third section will analyse a video performance of a poem – ‘Mistaken Identity’ by Kayole Poet Stars (2019) – that uses proximity rather than distance to create meaning. In other words, it is an example of a text that works differently from the previous two, and thus offers us a theoretical counterpoint that serves to underscore the key role that distance plays in the emergence of what I propose to call a street-aesthetic.

The Street Aesthetic, Distance and the Urban Sublime in Steve Bloom’s Trading Places

In his book Trading Places, Steve Bloom presents what can be seen as an aesthetic of everyday life in informal and semi-informal Nairobi neighbourhoods such as Kibera and Majengo. That this is what Bloom sets out to do becomes apparent in the introduction, where he writes that, while visiting the city after completing a ‘photographic expedition in remote regions of Ethiopia and northern Kenya,’ he was struck by ‘the energy of Nairobi’s street life and the colours of the shops’ (5–6). He describes how he was amazed by the uniqueness of the shopfronts, often painted in bright colours and decorated with hand-painted images of goods and services that are offered inside, and how he was impressed by the resilience and ingenuity of the business owners.

On the one hand, then, there is life itself and its vibrancy, the business owners’ creativity and resilience in the face of economic adversity. On the other hand, there is the visual impact of the built, often improvised environment, which houses this life, and which is a testament to creativity and resilience. Bloom describes his first impressions of the city – ‘the richly decorated façades,’ matatus that ‘resemble richly decorated Christmas trees,’ and painted ‘messages of optimism and fortitude’, such as ‘Never give up, Life Continues’ (7, 10). When he returns to the city a few years later to collect material for his book, he employs this wide-eyed tourist gaze, which ‘transforms informal settlements so that they become spaces variously of visual and experiential delight … and of global outrage at the condition of the poor’ (Dovey and King, ‘Active Interstices’ 186). Kim Dovey and Ross King discuss this visual ‘delight’ in the morphology and visual impact of more or less improvised architecture in terms of an ‘aesthetic of urban informality,’ and specifically ‘the aesthetic idea of the picturesque’ (‘Informal Urbanism’ 285).

The aesthetic that Dovey and King discuss and that is manifested in Bloom's photobook is in other words intimately connected with informal and improvisational strategies of getting by and of inhabiting the city. This informality can be understood as ‘a heterogeneous group of activities and employment relationships that share one common characteristic – the lack of legal recognition, regulation or protection’ (Lloyd-Evans 1885). Processes that are central elements in everyday life in the informal city, whether they are micro-transactions between buyers and sellers or the building of their homes, are typically understood as growing out of necessity, creative improvisation and opportunism (Dovey and King, ‘Informal Urbanism’ 276). The lack of regulation and protection does not mean that the political and economic elite are oblivious to the economic role and thrust of the unregulated economic sector or the existence and potential benefits of settlements where residents do not hold titles that give them legal security of tenure (Myers 83). It also does not mean that the formal and informal are two isolated separate spheres that never meet. In fact, it has been pointed out in the academic debate about (in)formality that they blend into each other to an extent that makes it difficult to maintain the dichotomous relation between the two terms (see Myers 79, Dovey and King ‘Informal Urbanism’ 276, ‘Active Interstices’ 185). Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall, for example, while not denying the existence of the processes and activities that the concepts refer to, point out that ‘the informal is not outside of the formal’ and that formalization and informalization are concurrent and joint processes (9). Formality/informality can thus be seen as both an integrated, dynamic relation between processes that are officially sanctioned and planned, and processes that do not follow an officially sanctioned script but might be accepted or even quietly encouraged (Myers 83). Together they shape everyday life in the African city.

The improvised creativity of everyday life is a central component of the aesthetic that emerges in Bloom’s book, which consists of 138 colour photographs of shop fronts, street scenes and portraits of business owners whom he interviewed. In places in Bloom’s book, the street does not seem to be a space where everyday life happens, but something that exists to function as a container of aesthetic value – as something that exists at a remove from life. This element of distance is a central component in Dovey and King’s theorization of the picturesque in slum aesthetics. They point out that what makes ‘informal urbanism (steel, plastic, concrete)’ picturesque is its ‘visibility at a distance,’ its visual impact on someone who is not him- or herself implicated in the everyday life in these spaces (‘Informal Urbanism’ 286). This, paradoxically, becomes evident in Bloom’s efforts to explain the photographic techniques he has used to ‘simulate’ a direct visual experience of everyday life in Nairobi’s streets:

The photographer’s ongoing challenge is to encapsulate life’s experiences in a rectangular, two-dimensional form. In reality, of course, we perceive the visual world as an endlessly unfolding synthesis of images, in which pieces come together and then disperse as our eyes dart around. In the photograph of the crowds of Majengo (pages 18–19), I elected to take multiple images from a single position, shifting the camera to simulate the movement of the eyes and build up a series of overlapping images. The resulting composite picture thus more closely approximates the way we see than a conventional photograph. It also depicts a brief passage of time, a minute or so. (12)

Here, Bloom brings two things to the reader’s attention that are central in any theory of the aestheticization of urban space: the spatial relation between subject and object, and the ontological difference between ‘life’ and ‘simulation’. The simulation of life in the two pictures to which Bloom refers is effective, largely because of the sheer multitude of information they contain. They both depict an extremely crowded street. The larger photograph is of a street that leads into the centre of the picture where it is cut off in the distance by a multi-storey building (18–19).³ There are approximately a thousand people in the street, maybe more. In the foreground matatus, lorries and cars, street hawkers and pushcarts piled high with vegetables and sacks are entangled in a traffic jam, while being passed on all sides by pedestrians. To the sides and in the background, there are shop signs and advertising for banks, pubs, a timber company and a petrol station. In the bottom right corner is a row of street stalls where business is going on. Someone has stacked vegetables in worryingly tall piles where people throng to get out of the way of the vehicles in the street, and vendors sell hats and button-down shirts.

The technique that Bloom employs makes the image the closest possible simulation of a brief moment of everyday life that can be created through the medium of still photography, but it is also an image that emphasizes distance between subject and object. Presumably, the series of photographs were taken from a walkway on a building perpendicular with the street in the centre of the composite image. This gives the impression that the eye is suspended above the overwhelming throng of people going about their daily life. In their work on slum tourism, Dovey and King identify the distance between overwhelming scenes and the eye that looks at them with the sublime. They see the sublime as a ‘combination of anxiety and pleasure’ elicited by overwhelming scale or force encountered ‘under conditions of safety’ (‘Informal Urbanism’ 286). Part of the effect of Bloom’s photograph is that it exposes the viewer to the sheer multitude of lives that intersect in the street at the same time as it manifests the spatial distance that separates the eye from these lives. This distance, represented by the visual perspective of the image, can in turn be seen as indicative of another, abstract kind of ‘distance,’ such as the relative economic advantage that allows Bloom to hire two bodyguards to follow him around the city (8).

The street photographs contrast with the architectural photographs that make out the majority of the images in the book, which focus on the creativity and ingenuity of business owners in less busy streets around the city. Bloom visits shops and other small businesses that he presumably selects for their distinct visual and architectural features and photographs the buildings separately, but also their owners at work inside or standing outside. An example is ‘Eclipse Hair Cut,’ a barbershop for men, owned by 35-year-old Richard Njuguna. This barbershop is presented in a series of six photographs. The first is a close-up portrait of Njuguna, who is smoking a cigarette (50). The second, in the same spread, is a photograph of the exterior of the shop. The interior is visible through a doorway and two large, glassless windows. Inside are Njuguna, giving a man a buzz cut, and another man who might be another customer waiting for his turn. The building is made of what looks like scrap wood and plywood sheets and a tarpaulin covers the roof (51). The lower part of the building is painted a marine blue that ends in waves, like an ocean horizon, while the upper two thirds of the exterior are milky white. There are three hand-painted images of men’s heads in profile, presumably examples of haircuts the customer may request. Above two of the heads is the name of the shop in wavy red and black letters and between them the slogan ‘BEAUTY IS YOUR BIRTH RIGHT’. The interior is painted a bright pink. On one wall is the price list, decorated with a small painted rose, and on the wall in front of the barber’s chair is painted ‘Change we can believe in’ (53).

The visual perspective in this part of the book does not emphasize spatial distance between subject and object, but instead a form of ironic distance is at work. Bloom seems to have an interest in details, such as the slogans painted on the walls of Eclipse Hair Cut, that create a somewhat unexpected distance between what could be and what demonstrably is. In the introduction, Bloom points to this element of contradiction and interprets it as a sign of the optimism and resilience he ascribes to ‘Africans everywhere’ (7): ‘A kerosene pump is not merely a kerosene pump but a “Blessing Kerosene Pump”. A carwash is transformed into an “Enlightened Car Wash”. Numerous butcher’s shops sell fresh meat, despite the lack of refrigeration’ (8). He specifically mentions one puzzling message that can be seen in the photograph on the cover of the book: ‘Welcome but no entry,’ painted on a door (5). Other examples are the ubiquitous shops where hot food is on offer, which are locally referred to as ‘hotels’ but do not offer room and board. Bloom uses this semantic slippage in a series of images of ten-square-meter tin-and-wood shacks, given names such as Hilton Hotel, to underscore the contradictory relation between what is claimed to be the case and what is actually and obviously the case from an outsider’s perspective.

Another related form of distance in Bloom’s book is what Ashleigh Harris calls ‘de-realization’. The language of Bloom’s introduction is full of references to illusion. The distance between photography and life becomes apparent when he recounts a visit to a photographer’s studio. He writes that the makeshift studio ‘invited customers to be photographed in front of a backdrop depicting North American wolves – a momentary escape into another world’ (6). This leads him to think about his own position in relation to the streets that he photographs: ‘As an outsider, I already felt I had stepped into a different world. The brightly coloured shop façades might have been stage sets designed for an African jazz musical’ (6). Here, it seems that it is precisely the improvised and informal quality of the physical environment that is the source of this sense that what he looks at is not the actual thing but something that is made to look like it, a projection of reality. The effect of the improvised, informal architecture is similar to the de-realization processes that Harris identifies in novels about African cities. Harris writes that:

If ontological realization actualizes something planned or intended, then its negative correlate, ontological de-realization, would be the failure or undoing of those intentions. It can also be read as making the real unreal, which leads us back to the fields of psychology and fiction. The psychological experience of de-realization describes a dissociation from reality. In fiction, psychological de-realization and ontological de-realization often overlap as magical and surreal narrative techniques confuse the line between the real and unreal. (6–7)

The de-realization process that Bloom experiences is part of the aestheticization of the street in his book. Since Bloom consistently tries to convey the reality of everyday life in the spaces he visits, the de-realization of these spaces is a process that never reaches completion, even though his photographs are remediated images of this life and thus a form of illusion in themselves. The street is visibly and demonstrably there, as are the people who inhabit and work in the makeshift buildings he photographs, but Bloom notes that, from his vantage point as a person who is not part of this life, the buildings appear at times only to look like buildings. In other words, he sees them as the kind of simulation of life that he himself painstakingly creates in his composite images of life in the streets. The street then seems to be continuously de-realized while Bloom seeks to counter this process through simulation.

By focusing on how (spatial, semantic, and psychological) distance is manifested in Bloom’s book, attention may be shifted from the motif of everyday life to a visual language that references that life. This visual language is what I propose to call Bloom’s street aesthetic. What I have in mind is not the ‘aesthetic’ choices that Bloom makes as a professional photographer or the technique he uses in his photographic work – or the visual impact of the built environment itself – but the aesthetic result of such techniques and choices. Since it can be conceptualized as a code made up of elemental units (images, tools, materials, surfaces) it can be appropriated by other forms, including literary forms, as we will see in the following section, which focuses on literary magazine Kwani?’s ultimately failed attempt to create a literary aesthetics based on popular forms associated with informality and everyday life.

Kwani?, Formalization and the Creativity of Everyday Life

Kwani? started as a print journal in 2003 and almost immediately gained international recognition as an innovative publication run by and introducing new Kenyan and East African writers of a kind very different from their postcolonial forebears. Critics have emphasized its role in forging continental and global literary networks through which a generation of East African writers reached new readerships, but also its important role in documenting the wave of inter-ethnic violence that followed the late 2007 Kenyan election (Kiguru; Ligaga; Muhoma; Wallis 2018). One of its stated ambitions was to tap into the creativity of everyday life on the street. Because of its pivotal role in Kenyan and African literature, I want to use Kwani? as a case study of the aestheticization that we are concerned with here. As we will see, its first main editor – author and 2002 Caine Prize winner Binyavanga Wainaina – described encountering an aesthetic of the streets that he was intent on channelling to a wider, cosmopolitan audience. However, he paradoxically simultaneously foregrounded his own and Kwani?’s distance from the streets. Unsurprisingly, then, the ambition to provide a space for the popular forms generated by the ceaseless creative production in the streets was never fully realized. Instead, the journal developed in other directions, first under Wainaina's editorship, and later under the editorship of Billy Kahora, who acted as its main editor for most of the journal’s life, notably toward promoting young Kenyan writers and collective projects of documentation of political unrest.

However, in its early days, the team behind Kwani? intended the journal to function as a link between its cosmopolitan audience and everyday life in the Kenyan street. Wainaina’s brief introduction to the first issue, where he formulates this ambition, channels the optimism of the time. The repressive regime of Daniel arap Moi had recently lost its hold on political power after more than two decades and had been replaced by the National Rainbow Coalition, led by Mwai Kibaki. With the political winds changing, Wainaina saw a bright future for Kenyan literature, so much so that he predicted that Kenya would soon become ‘known around the continent as a country of creative energy,’ and to him it was in the streets that this creativity was particularly apparent (6):

Lately I seem to meet all kinds of interesting people. Mostly young, self motivated [sic] people, who have created a space for themselves in an adverse economy by being innovative. I have met a guy who engraves glass with exquisite skill; another guy who designs clothes, bags and other products for factories. I have met … writers who never studied literature who are writing at a level I did not know existed in this country. […] I have met an artist who is twenty one [sic] years old, and who must have Kenya’s largest art exhibition – all around the streets and alleyways of Eastleigh and Mathare. His name is Joga. I have met a writer, who has the power of words to invoke place like no other Kenyan I know. He works as a gardener. His name is Stanley Gazemba. (Wainaina, ‘Editorial’ 6)

Wainaina’s rhetorical voice betrays a degree of surprise. The new acquaintances seem not to have been displaced from their geographical context – Wainaina specifically points out their rootedness in Nairobi's soil, in the city's ‘streets and alleyways' (6) – but have certainly been displaced institutionally: they are not formally trained as artists, musicians and writers; they are not products of the country’s institutions of higher education. To Wainaina, they are rather products of the Structural Adjustment Programmes and the Moi government’s failed economic policies. Their work is not only the result of individual talent, but also the resilience that people have developed to get by in the ‘adverse economy’. He points to this resilience and creativity as the source of an aesthetic for which this new journal presumably intends to provide a space:

To me this says we are finally becoming a country. When art as expression starts to appear, without prompting, all over the suburbs and villages of this country, what we are saying is: we are confident enough to create our own living, our own environment, our own aesthetic. Such an aesthetic will not be donated to us from the corridors of a university; or from the ministry of culture, or by The French Cultural Centre. It will come from the individual creations of thousands of creative people. (6)

The aesthetic emphatically comes out of informality since, like the base components of people’s everyday life, it is created by themselves without the interference of university professors, the political elite or wealthy foreign benefactors. It grows out of shared hardships and experiences of overcoming them. Here the perspective of the text moves beyond the streets and to a much larger, national level. Wainaina’s collective ‘we’ can only be read as a large, national collective because, as we have seen, he has just expressed surprise at encountering talented Kenyans such as Gazemba (who today is an internationally established author and journalist) and Joga, of whose talent he, until recently, was unaware. It is only through this abstract category of a shared Kenyanness that Wainaina is both able to see and appreciate the aesthetic he has just discovered but already claims as his own.

The contradictions of Wainaina’s position in relation to the aesthetic emerging from the streets become more evident in his rejection of the establishment and the economic elite. What made Kwani? possible as a venture in the first place (apart from the fall of the Moi regime) was a substantial grant (more than US$100 000 annually) from the American Ford Foundation, which Wainaina and the other founding members of the Kwani Trust had applied for in 2002 (Brouillette 26). There is an obvious contradiction in Wainaina’s claim that Kenyan literature has little to gain from the Ministry of Culture and the French Cultural Centre, while it is clearly stated on the first page of the journal that the Kwani Trust had received financial backing from the Ford Foundation (6). In Kwani?’s second issue, Ebba Kalondo, sitting in for Wainaina who was overseas, extends Kwani?’s thanks to both The Ministry of Culture and The French Cultural Centre, as well as the British Council, the Goethe Institute and the Commercial Bank of Africa (Kalondo 5). It is undoubtedly the case that Kwani? would and could not have existed in the form it took without this financial backing, which allowed the journal to reach a far bigger and more far-flung audience than it otherwise would have. The fact that Wainaina was only able to reject the institutions of the national and global establishment on a rhetorical level but accepted their economic support may be seen to be hypocrisy on his part. It could, however, also be argued that Kwani? had no alternative and that accepting financial backing was absolutely necessary and that, precisely because of this, the contradiction in Wainaina’s attitude to the establishment can be understood as an attempt to signal an ideological position – an aesthetic and political identification with popular cultural creativity of the informal Nairobi and Kenya and a (deliberately naïve, unrealistic) wish to stay independent of governmental interference.⁴

As Parselelo Kantai, Carey Baraka and Isaac Otidi Amuke observe in their recent articles about the rise and fall of Kwani?, the journal’s inner circle in its early years was composed almost exclusively of people who came from the country’s economic and political elite. As Wainaina’s editorial clearly shows, this did not mean that the contributing writers were unaware of the precarity of everyday life for most Nairobians, or that none of them had struggled economically. However, most of them came from relatively economically privileged backgrounds and worked within the formal rather than informal sector. According to founding member Parselelo Kantai, these people were ‘ad-men and women, teachers at the GCSE schools, UN expats and in-pats, journalists, civil society types’; in short ‘Nairobi’s bourgeoisie’ (n.p). Baraka points out that some of the men who belonged to the early Kwani?’s inner circle knew each other from the same upper middle-class school in Nairobi (n.p). This eventually led to accusations that Kwani? was ‘an elitist project courtesy of the class dynamics at play’ (n.p). Though Kantai, Baraka and Otidi’s texts are hardly sociological studies, the fact that they all foreground the privileged backgrounds of the early Kwani? group says something about the journal’s relative distance from the life in the city’s low-income areas and informal sector and thus arguably also about the prospects for Wainaina’s aesthetic vision.

Wainaina’s relative distance from the streets becomes immediately evident in his first contribution to the journal as a writer – an interview with the hip-hop group Kalamashaka from the low-income Nairobi neighbourhood, Dandora. At the time of the interview, the group had recently recorded their song ‘Moto’ (‘Fire’), alluding to revolution. The refrain translates from Kiswahili as ‘Fire, fire. Let it announce a revolution’ (Wainaina, ‘Kalamashaka’, 54). Wainaina, therefore, begins the interview by asking the members of the group if they are ‘advocating a revolution?’ (54). The group member Johnny ‘Joni’ Vigetti explains that ‘people from this side of Nairobi are coming to that side of Nairobi to listen to Kalamashaka. This revolution is not about violence, it’s more about being conscious of who you are’ (54). If ‘that side of Nairobi’ is taken to refer to Dandora, ‘this side’ may refer to the more upscale neighbourhoods in Nairobi (particularly on its western side) where the interview presumably took place. The revolution Vigetti refers to is in other words metaphorical and takes the form of an increasing exchange between Nairobi’s formal and informal spheres. Another band member adds that ‘people are saying that people from the ghetto are lazy, that they don’t want to work. If you look at it this way, in Kenya 85% of people live below the poverty line. So what they are trying to tell us is that only 10% of Kenyans are hardworking?’ (55). He points out that if people (Wainaina adds the word rich in brackets) fail to understand that most people are not unemployed but work within the informal sector, then they might find themselves in the middle of a ‘revolution’. This makes Wainaina address the reader directly and admit that ‘I am scared, hearing all this talk’ (55). This is not just a remarkably ‘square’ response to the band members’ attempts to explain to him what they are trying to convey with their music; it is an obvious exaggeration that serves to foreground Wainaina’s position in relation to the group and what they represent. The fact that he is willing to paint himself as a pearl-clutching representative of the cultured middle class after having identified the kind of cultural production that Kalamashaka represent as the source of a new aesthetics indicates that this contradiction is not entirely a result of Wainaina’s being out of touch. The unflattering position Wainaina takes can be seen as a sacrifice: through self-irony he emphasizes Kalamashaka’s proximity to the street by emphasizing his distance from them, which can be seen as part of his attempt to find a position for the journal between the streets and its cosmopolitan audience.

This position is maintained throughout the text, which at one point turns into a reflection on the Kenyan middle class’s relation to the streets. Wainaina writes about how things were before he left the country to spend a decade in South Africa. Back then, the middle class listened to ‘bubble gum’ artists such as Michael Jackson and Kenny G and had not yet become disillusioned with the poor performance of the country’s government and economy. ‘My generation of wannabe middle-class Kenyans believed in all of it; with a fervour that I now find bewildering,’ he writes, ‘[in] the Queen, in Karen Blixen, in Rugby, America’ (55). In the 1990s, however, the Moi regime started to lose political control and the Kenyan economy crashed, which meant that scores of well-educated Kenyans found themselves without jobs and prospects. Kalamashaka’s songs about fire and revolution therefore resonated with ‘all classes in Nairobi and other urban areas,’ Wainaina explains (56). On the one hand, then, there are the disgruntled university students whose bright future has been taken from them by the incompetent Moi regime and, on the other, the ‘talk’ of revolution coming out of low-income neighbourhoods such as Dandora and Kayole. However, Wainaina has not only just explained that Kalamashaka’s aggressive politics ‘scare’ him, but also demonstrates that he does not entirely understand their message. He leaves the interview ‘somewhat shaken, thinking that maybe there is another song being sang [sic] in this country, sang by that other Kenya, the urban forgotten, who are tired of being on the bottom of the pile’ (58). He only hopes, he concludes, that ‘we, on the other side, are listening’. Wainaina then explicitly positions himself ‘on the other side,’ at a remove from the Dandora streets from which Kalamashaka’s music emerges. As I have argued above, this distance is a requisite for the particular way that Wainaina, in this case, appreciates and understands cultural expressions emerging from the street. And it allows him to structure his texts around a ‘combination of anxiety and pleasure’ that Dovey and King see as a key component in the aesthetic of the urban sublime (‘Informal Urbanism’ 286).

The adoption of this aesthetic of anxiety and pleasure in Kwani? can be understood in terms of a formalization process. I see Wainaina and Kwani?’s attempts to provide a space for unsanctioned or informal cultural expressions as an adaptation process by which ephemeral and informal forms are framed as art. Kate Wallis has pointed out that critics have tended to focus on Kwani?’s curatorial role in its early days. Dinah Ligaga (2005), for example, argues that ‘the early editions of the Kwani? journal were distinctive in drawing on and representing forms from Kenyan popular culture (from email to Sheng to matatu slogans) not previously represented in and as literature’ (qtd. in Wallis, ‘How Books Matter’ 40). Doreen Strauhs (2013) argues that the inclusion of forms such as SMSs and emails was a way in which Kwani? attempted to disintegrate ‘the borders between online and offline communication’ (qtd. in Wallis, ‘How Books Matter’ 40). Wallis, on the other hand, argues that ‘Kwani? was concerned not to disintegrate, but in fact to draw attention to these borders, and that the journal has been self-conscious about its own role in formalizing or validating diverse forms of Kenyan creativity by making them available in print’ (‘How Books Matter’ 40). And Katherine Haines argues that Kwani?, by ‘bringing together a range of different forms from Kenyan popular culture, and putting these into print alongside literary fiction,’ brought to readers’ attention ‘the forms in which histories characterized as hidden already exist[ed]’ (54).

Kwani? was, in other words, driven by a conscious strategy to validate forms it identified as emerging out of everyday life. An example of this is the matatu slogans mentioned by Ligaga. They appear in a poem titled ‘The Smasher: A poem written by Kenyan matatus (plus two buses and two trucks),’ by ‘freelance writer, PR guru and consultant’ Ralph Johnstone in Kwani?’s first issue (101). Though it is presented as a collage of slogans and expressions that have been collected on the street, there is no way of certifying that the poem consists of actual slogans painted on real matatus and collected by Johnstone. It therefore presents itself as a poem by a poet who may or may not have invented the slogans himself. The ‘slogans’ are arranged in stanzas such as: ‘CAN’T TOUCH THIS / REAL / WHIZZ, / SHARP / SWIFT / ROAD SENSER’ (96). As this stanza indicates, the slogans are arranged in ways that give the poem a rhythm, and in some cases a rhyme scheme: ‘ALL CRY OUT / SHUT ‘EM DOWN! / AFRICA UNITE / DOMINANCE 2000 FLIGHT / STEP BY STEP / UPRISING’ (98). This also brings attention to the poet’s compositional strategy and the text’s ‘poem-ness’. The text relies on the distance between this emphasized ‘poem-ness’ (rhyme scheme, rhythm, composition) and the signifiers lifted from the street (‘F**K DAT,’ ‘HOUSETONBOYZFOREVER,’ ‘SHIT HAPPENS’) in order to recontextualize the slogans. This can be seen then as a form of formalization that gives rise to a new street-aesthetic that is not identical with, but is rather disconnected from, the context that the slogans presumably come from. This kind of formalization is thus radically different from the processes out of which popular cultural forms ‘crystallize' from ‘everyday life' (Barber 8).

This formalization, which is presented in the first issue of Kwani? as a prioritized working strategy, though it was rarely applied, can be understood as part of an ideological project to reinvent a national identity. Before the publication of the first issue, Kwani? registered a homepage where some material was published in anticipation of the launch of the journal. In the ‘About us’ section on the homepage, readers learned that the journal's assumption was that there was a ‘dynamic and homogenized Kenyan identity’ that is ‘lived out in contemporary and popular forms’ around the country and ‘particularly in urban areas’ (Kwani? homepage 2002). There is, however, a ‘persistent “official” denial (by the media and by politicians) of this identity’. It, therefore, becomes incumbent on the journal to provide writers and readers ‘with a forum that helps them answer questions about themselves’. The ‘dynamic’ Kenyan identity, whatever that may be, is placed firmly outside the formal sphere of the media mainstream and officially sanctioned national discourse. It is only possible for the elite to ignore it if this emergent national identity is associated with the informal. The reader seems to exist inside or partly inside the formal sphere but can access this Kenyan identity in mediated form through the ‘popular’ cultural expressions that find their way into the journal through formalization processes, such as the matatu slogans in Johnstone’s poem.

Kwani? undoubtedly contributed to a discourse of Kenyanness, but this did not happen because of the formalization of popular cultural expressions so much as through the journal’s success internationally. It helped launch the international careers of several Kenyan writers, notably Wainaina, Yvonne Adhiambo Owour and Wainaina’s successor as editor, Billy Kahora. It was less successful in introducing the average Kenyan reader to their writing, however, partly because the journal with its innovative and eye-catching layout and format was too expensive for most people to buy. This is ironically evident in Kwani?’s so-called ‘Sheng issue,’ where the idea was to tap into writing in this Kiswahili-based ‘hybrid code’ (Kaviti 224). The origin of Sheng is in Nairobi’s Eastlands and it is spoken by ‘“urban youth” from the lower half of the social economic class pyramid’ (Githiora 105–06). In other words, a large portion of readers who understand Sheng presumably reside in what the World Bank defines as slums, in which, in 2005, the average monthly income per capita was US$40, while an issue of Kwani? was sold for US$20 on the Kwani Trust homepage (World Bank 2006: 24).⁵ This may be one explanation for why only forty out of the 416 pages that make up the Sheng issue contain text that is only or mainly in Kiswahili/Sheng.

The intent in this section about Kwani? has been to show the contradiction between the journal’s ambition to adapt a street aesthetic from the informal spaces of Nairobi and Kenya, and the many ways in which it leaned toward the formal. My focus has been on how this ambition was originally formulated by Wainaina in the first issue where he distances the journal from Western foundations and identifies the street as a space from which Kwani? was going to source its content. To foreground the street-ness of the material, however, Wainaina underscores his own outsider status in relation to the mean streets of eastern Nairobi. The most worthwhile theoretical interpretation of this contradiction is not that it was wholly due to Wainaina’s (and other Kwani? writers’) inability to engage with popular forms and the creativity of everyday life on the street. Instead, it can be seen as an attempt to take up an unstable position between a Sheng/Kiswahili-dominated popular culture and a formal, Anglophone, international literary space. What is more, the contradictions in the first Kwani? issue do not mean that formalization was the only or even the main intention behind the Kwani? project. It does, however, indicate that similar mechanisms of distancing that the street aesthetic in Bloom’s book relies on were at work in Kwani? from its early days, even though the journal explicitly sought to provide a literary space that could bridge precisely this distance.

Ile Mtaa ‘More Fire’: Proximity in ‘Mistaken Identity’.

I turn now to a video of a poetry performance in Sheng/Kiswahili and English that consciously situates itself in the street but mobilizes modes of meaning-making that contrast with the street aesthetic that Wainaina imagines and that emerges in Bloom’s photobook. The poem is ‘Mistaken Identity’ by the collective Kayole Poet Stars. The video was produced by Watulivu Music and Film Production, a production company based in Nairobi and is available on YouTube where to date it has been viewed more than 32 500 times. While this may not be much by YouTube-standards, for a poem it is not a small number of views. As its title suggests, the poem is an attempt to counter the negative view of the Eastern Nairobi neighbourhood of Kayole, which for some has come to be associated with gang violence and abject poverty. Because of space constraints, I will focus mainly on the first part of this poem, performed by Felly Karembo, who has a sizable following on YouTube, has been interviewed in Kenyan television programmes and has competed in slam poetry contests internationally.

I want to discuss this poem/video here because it articulates proximity rather than distance in its attempt to represent everyday life. Though it mobilizes a series of signifiers and symbols associated with the street, it foregrounds its own rootedness in place and the fact that the local is key to unpack some of the meaning in the poem. The component of proximity is emphasized through the focus on place both in the poem as a text and in the video. In contrast to the street aesthetics discussed in the previous sections, Karembo’s part of the poem brings the reader closer to everyday life and it is from this proximate position that we elicit meaning from the images of local characters and the things they do. In his Eastern African Literature: Towards and Aesthetics of Proximity, Russell West-Pavlov develops a theory of proximity and writes that this concept ‘assumes several interrelated valences,’ but that a central component ‘is the notion of a proximate communicative situation in the realm of aesthetic production, a mode of “mimesis” that implies “contact” and “contagion”’ (xv). Through a series of rhetorical and linguistic strategies, which will be studied below, Kayole Poet Stars and especially Karembo, create a sense of social and spatial ‘contact’ between the poetic voice, the listener and the ‘mtaa’ (neighbourhood/streets/estate) of Kayole as a geographical location and social space.

The different forms of proximity in the poem are a result primarily of how the text (and video) is structured. This should not be seen as an indication that it is a more authentic text than those discussed above. On the surface it is in many ways similar to countless hip-hop videos, slam poetry texts and other popular forms utilized by urban youth around the world to contribute to social discourse about their neighbourhoods. It does not present itself as a ‘pure’ vernacular and local work, which is made apparent by the use of German seventeenth-century composer Johann Pachelbel’s ‘Canon in D’ as a background score. This music is neither local nor particularly closely associated with everyday life in an East African metropolis, but is used to add to the intensity of the poem and perhaps consciously to distance it from the kind of constructed street-aesthetic at work in places such as The Alchemist, which caters to the taste of the city’s yuppies. It is in any case a reminder not to see ‘Mistaken Identity’ as raw sociological empirical material, but a complex text that combines expressions and forms derived from more than one aesthetic paradigm and place. The poem/video is, however, relevant here insofar as it can be seen as a text created using available resources, both concrete and immaterial, to speak in a place about that place.

‘Mistaken Identity’ is about life in Kayole and is also performed there, which means that everything in the frame, however incidental, is part of the meaning-making in the video. But this is not to say that how the poem references place and proximity is an accidental effect of the material conditions of the context of production – that the video could only have turned out the way it did because of a lack of resources, a certain aesthetic tradition and because of the composition of everyday life in Kayole. Instead, the poem relies on a series of rhetorical strategies to draw attention to the fact that the actual, concrete street environment is co-constitutive of the video as a creative work (Harris and Hållén).

In the video we see unpainted brick walls in the background, a parked car, shacks and corrugated iron fences, and on one side the yard opens up to the Kayole skyline to the west. Large black letters on a façade spell out ‘Malisho Secondary School,’ which allows us to pinpoint the exact location of the shoot – the Sheep Care Community Centre in central Kayole. In the distance are multi-storey apartment buildings, rooftops and satellite dishes. The video is interspersed with scenes from the nearby streets where young school children are waving at the camera, someone is cutting up fruit in a street stall and a man is sorting pieces of coal in buckets.

In the opening shot we see a paved yard where ten young people stand and sit around an upturned cart. There are other references to carts in the poem and in a brief shot from the street. In this scene, a man is dragging a cart loaded with a couch, an armchair and a coffee table up a narrow, paved street. This gives us an indication of the prioritized rhetorical trope in the video and particularly in Felly Karembo’s part of the poem: metonymy and synecdoche. The focus on such things as sheet metal, bricks, fences and other surfaces associated with the street cannot be seen as an adapted assemblage of signifiers or a code that is consciously presented as an aesthetic. The signifiers at The Alchemist bar discussed at the start of this article become part of an aesthetic by being lifted out of everyday life in the informal city and into a new context. A cheap building material becomes a decorative material that at the same time refers to and evokes something. In ‘Mistaken Identity’ the cart is representative only of its place in a larger context: the informal economy or, in other words, everyday life in Kayole.

The camera circles the group around the cart and lands on each of the poets when it is his or her turn to speak. Some of them are filmed in another spot in the courtyard while performing, leaning against a brick wall, or sitting on a pile of bricks. Having zoomed in on the cart, the camera focuses on Felly Karembo, who steps forward. She begins:

[In English:] So what comes to your mind at the mention of the place, Kayole? I know, I mean, you don’t need to tell me. [In Kiswahili/Sheng:] Haters will be complaining they got beaten up in Kayole. That in Kayole, there is Gaza. [Eng:] Or this, or that, well … [K:] I am not here to plead on behalf of my neighbourhood, and I am not here to put it down. I am here to change your mindset, [Eng:] what you think about this estate. [K:] When Kayole is mentioned [Eng:] do you know what comes into my mind? Creative, Adorable, Young, Ordinary Legends Existing, or let’s say Kayole’s A Youth Ordinary Life Empire. [K:] It’s here that you will find Kamau and Adhiambo pushing a handcart together trying to put food on the table. It’s here that you will find Wambo, Atieno and Musyoka trying to achieve their dreams. It’s here that you will find Mama Njoro and Mama Adhis approaching the chief together to get school bursaries. (0:15–1:15)⁶

The Gaza are a well-known, violent street gang that is reputed to be based in Kayole (Nairobi News Reporter). The fact that they are mentioned early in the video serves to underscore Karembo’s meta-comment, that she is not going to plead for her neighbourhood. It is counterbalanced by the images of unity and cooperation in the latter half of the quoted passage, such as the two men who are pushing a cart down the street.

The fact that the two men are mentioned by name is an example of how proximity is used in the poem. It signals that the poetic voice is familiar with these two locals, and by extension, Karembo rhetorically constructs a listener who is also acquainted with them. The image of the two men can be seen as a symbol of interethnic unity, which echoes the Jomo Kenyatta government’s ideology of harambee (often translated as ‘pulling together’): the fact that Kamau is a common Kikuyu name and Adhiambo is a Luo name tells us that these two men are not related, but friends and neighbours. It is not an accident that this image of constructive inter-ethnic cooperation is drawn from the informal economic sector. The creativity of everyday life is after all such an important constitutive component of the ‘empire’ of Kayole that Karembo uses it in the acronym K.A.Y.O.L.E even though ‘creativity’ does not actually begin with a K.

There is a pattern in the three sentences that begin ‘it’s here that’ based on the verbal prefixes in the first and the second verb. The first verb in all the three sentences is utapata (‘you will get/find’), with the subject prefix ‘u-’ which refers to the intended listener, while the prefix in the second verb tells us that two or more people are doing something together: they push a cart, try to realize their dreams and approach/go together to the chief. Part of the pattern in these sentences then is a repetition of relations, between the listener and several locals, and between these locals, who are doing things together. This form of proximity through relations is particularly emphasized in the sentence about Mama Njoro and Mama Adhis who go together to the local chief’s office to ask for school bursaries. We do not learn the two women’s names but know that they are the mothers of Njoro and Adhis. ‘You,’ the listener who ‘will find,’ is transported to the neighbourhood where the Kikuyu boy, Njoroge, and Luo girl, Adhiambo, live. It is through them that we recognize their mothers, and when we learn that they are going to the chief’s office to ask for bursaries we know that it is to send these two children to school.

The end of Karembo’s part of the video introduces a theme that is picked up by some of the other poets: other Nairobians’ prejudice against Kayole. She describes meeting a ‘Mr. Handsome’ at a bar in the city. When he learns that she is from Kayole he at first refuses to believe it because she seems like a ‘decent’ girl, but then he ignores her. What, she asks, should she have done to keep the man’s interest. Should she have dressed in ragged clothes, or should she have acted more girlishly? It is implied that she has no intention to do either of these things because, as she says in her last lines, ‘Isn’t Kayole home? Kayole is my neighbourhood’ (1:54–1:56, ‘Si Kayole ndio home? Kayole ndio mtaa yangu’). In other words, it is implied that it is out of the question to participate in the stereotype by dressing in a certain way, and that she is also not going to pretend to be someone else since this would be to deny the fact that she is a person from Kayole.

Interestingly, one strategy the poets use to counter preconceived notions is to hold up local wasanii (composers, writers, artists, designers). Bena wa Malines, a self-described poet, comedian and rapper says that ‘the neighbourhood of wasnaii has enabled Philo to come so far. Karembo’s beautiful neighbourhood cannot fail you. The home of art, matatus and soul music. Taken together, you know that we live in Kayole by passion’ (4:32–4:45).⁷ These are things and people who have a cultural value that does not have to be explained. There is no question that Philo (‘Philosopher the one’) and Karembo, who stands only a few steps from the poet, are local poets of whom to be proud. What he does, then, is not too different from what Wainaina does in his editorial when he describes discovering the culture of the street. But here the poet is asking Nairobians to see beyond their fears of ‘the darkness of Gaza,’ which he expels with the light (mwangaza) of creativity, and realize that the matatus and soul music and Karembo are also from Kayole. Bena wa Malines thus attempts to create a symbolic proximity by pointing out that other Nairobians already know Kayole intimately through the cultural forms and artists that come out of this neighbourhood.

Conclusion

This article sheds light on the aestheticization of everyday life in Nairobi, in literature and in other forms of culture. I have argued that the street-aesthetic that emerges from Bloom’s photobook Trading Places and that which Binyavanga Wainaina outlined in his early work with Kwani? depends on various forms of distance from the informal and everyday life on the street. It is this distance that allows the elements of the aesthetic to be perceived aesthetically and at the same time to refer to something beyond itself. In the last part of the article, I have pointed to some ways in which Karembo’s part of the poem, ‘Mistaken Identity,’ instead invokes proximity to create meaning. My intention with this comparative exercise has been to accentuate this difference in how meaning is created in different contexts in which ‘the street’ is central as a space of ordinary people’s everyday life.

This fascination can be a deceptive common denominator if it is taken to mean that the authors of these texts have enjoyed the same possibilities and experienced the same limitations when creating their works. This article has aimed to show that this is not the case and that there is a relevant difference between street-aesthetics and representations of the city that foregrounds proximity. However, insofar as proximity rather than distance is seen as the preferable vantage point from which to represent the city – for ethical, political or any other reason – it is a vantage point that is not equally accessible for everyone at all times.

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2023.2140929).

Notes

1 The Sound of Nairobi homepage can be accessed at https://soundofnairobi.net/

2 Since work started on this article, Nairobi’s governor Ann Kananu forced The Alchemist to close temporarily due to allegations of racism and suspended its license to operate. A staff video showing security lining people up based on skin colour went viral in late May 2022, after which The Alchemist closed while investigating the claims and hiring new security staff. This incident underscores the irony of its architectural aesthetic and the fact that The Alchemist caters to the more affluent crowd – which in this part of the city is partly composed of tourists from Europe and North America (see Ngina).

3 A portfolio containing the images described here can be found on Bloom’s homepage:

https://www.stevebloomphoto.com/portfolios/people/merchants_of_nairobi/slideshow.html

4 As Baraka (2020) and Otidi (2020) intimate in their recent articles about Kwani?, the attempt to avoid interference from the political establishment seems ultimately to have been unsuccessful, since there are indications that the Kwani Trust was infiltrated by government operatives.

5 The price for the second issue of Kwani? was US$20 on the Kwani Trust homepage in 2005 (Purchase, see also Brouillette 33, Strauhs 24).

6 I am very grateful to Dr Charles Kebaya and Amol Awour (Ma) for the transcription and translation of Kerambo’s part of the poem, which reads as follows:

So, what comes to your mind at the mention of the place, Kayole? I know, I mean, you don’t need to tell me. Oh Kayole nikapigwe ngeta. Sijui oh Kayole kuna Gaza or this or that, well … Siko hapa kutetea mtaa yangu na siko hapa kutoanishaa hood yangu. But let’s just say niko hapa kuchange mindset yako – kuchange what you think about this estate. Kayole ikitajwa, do you know what comes into my mind? Creative, adorable, young ordinary legends, Existing, or let’s say Kayole is a youth ordinary life empire. Si hapa ndio utapata Kamau na Adhiambo wakisukuma mkoko wakijaribu keroma kwa table. Hapa ndio utapata Wambu, Atieno, Musyoka na Wesonga wameunda banner wana try kusongesha dream zao mbele. Hapa ndio utapata Mama Njoro na Mama Adhis wakiendea bursary kwa chief.

7 ‘Mtaa ya wasanii imemfiksha Philo so far. Mtaa rembo ya kina Karembo haiwezi kufeili. Mtaa ya Art, na ma matatus, jogoo, soul creto. Zikipatana na miniacs, utajua we live in Kayole by passion.’